Semantic Language and Tools for Reporting Human Factors Incidents

Commercial tools for incident reporting are available in a diverse range of domains from crime incidents to corporate security incidents to customer complaints. Like the proposed software, most of these products support electronic submission and reporting of incident data, and archival of incident reports. The proposed approach differs from these commercial tools in providing a semantic basis for customization and improved search, and in representing incidents in an XML-based language. Such capabilities permit applying much of the incident reporting software developed for NASA in non-NASA applications. Promising applications include reporting incidents arising in chemical and nuclear plants, such as incidents arising from human error during plant operations, and reporting medical incidents, such as incidents that arise when monitoring the aged or impaired in performing the activities of daily living.

Incident reporting is an important part of handling issues that arise during space operations. NASA missions currently report flight incidents using approaches such as the Problem Reporting and Corrective Action (PRACA) process for Shuttle and Station, Shuttle In-Flight Anomaly (IFA) reports, and Station Items for Investigation (IFI). The semantic language and tools for incident reporting TRACLabs is developing are complementary but not duplicative with these approaches. They are intended to support user groups that have information needs not well addressed by programmatic incident reporting systems. For example, the space human factors organization needs to track incidents related to human factors and habitability issues not captured in current incident archives. We use semantic web technologies to embed domain semantics in incident data and utilize these semantics to improve database search and reporting. The software is customized by defining new domain semantics or adding XML tags for special domain needs. More »